The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

THE LOVELY BONES

ISBN - 9780316166683
FIRST PUBLISHED - 
PAGES - 238
GENRE - Fiction
BINDING - Paperback

AUTHOR - Alice Sebold

BEST-SELLERS - Lucky, The Almost Noon

SYNOPSIS - My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighbourhood.

Watching from her place in heaven, Susie Salmon sees her suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet.


QUOTES -

Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had. 

Between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. That doesn’t mean the weaker one doesn’t love the stronger. 

The living deserve attention, too.

FL Speak - Ever been in a catch-22 situation? Unsure of what to do or how to proceed? Well picking up Alice Sebold was something like that.

(Contains spoilers. You're warned)

Susie is dead. Raped and murdered by someone within their neighbourhood. Now she's in heaven and she's watching. At this moment, I expected something extraordinary. I got nothing. 

Heaven is your normal high school. You have rooms and someone like a teacher to look after you. I mean c'mon!! Anyway, I was ready to forget that. I wanted to know what waa happening on Earth. So did Susie. And what was happening on Earth was pretty ordinary.

Susie's dad takes her death to the heart. He has a gut feeling that he knew that man had killed his child when he was talking to him. But there was no proof and hence no arrests. This continues for a couple of years at which point his wife gets fed of his persistence and starts having an affair with the local detective. Why?? Because no one is there to care about her. Boneheaded slut.

More years pass. I started to wonder if there is going to be justice of any sort or are we just gonna watch Susie's entire family grow up and die. Coming to her family, her kid sistet has grown up and is gettig married. Meanwhile in heaven, Susie is mooning over the guy she kissed on Earth when she was alive and watches him kissing some other girl, another so-called friend of hers.

Fast forward to a couple of more years, and the murderer is now dead. The police have finally enough to convict him, but he's on the run and somehow met with a freak accident. *bangs head on the wall*

If you thought Sebold has done enough damage to my brain, hold the thought.  What comes next, is appaling. Susie finally figurea out a way to make contact. Somehow, defying everything normal, she jumps into the body of her friend, kicking her soul out momentarily....without her permission. But she has a reason right?? To finally see her parents, her siblings?? To tell them that she's happy in heaven...and stuff like that. NO!!! As soon as she makes contact with Earth in a different body, she has sex with the guy she kissed in school. 

The-fucking-end.

Positives from the book : excellent writing. The prose, the words will make you weep. And yet it will make you shoulder on till you drop.

PRICE - INR 350/-